Stunted Growth

I feel like I've grow up "wrong".  And I feel like that has hurt me in some ways and helped me in others.  In one way, I'm good at being an emotional grown-up.  But on the flip-side, I feel like I'm still a kid who just never grew up.  I feel like because of my mom's death I've lost out of things "normal" kids have.  Like when I should have been in college planning a future, deciding what I "want to be when I grow up", I was busy trying to make it to the next day.  I feel like people my age know what they want, know what they need, and I'm lost, I have no idea what I want or need.  I went to the college I picked out with my mom.  I was going to major in a degree that she'd mentioned she thought I'd be good at.  I planned my life based on my dead mother and I've been floundering ever since.  In the past 12 years I've struggled finding the right job, the right life, the right every thing.  It's like now that she's gone I can't make a decision, I don't know what's best for me.  And I'll be honest, I'm tired of it.  I'm tired of not knowing what I need, of wishing I had her to tell me.  I'm sad that I let my dead mother pick this life for me since she's not here to help.  I'm sad that I never finished college because I picked a school and a degree because of my dead mom.  I'm not blaming her, but I feel like her death stopped me cold in my tracks and I've never really been able to start up again.  I feel like I was gyped, like I should have been making a life plan but instead I was grieving her and now it's too late to go back and be a college student bumming off your parents while you figure out life.  Sure I could go back to college but my bill still have to be paid, because I never made my decision then.  Sometimes it makes me more sad to think that I've wasted this much of my life and I'm not sure I can fix the damage I've created in my own life.

But to end this on a positive note or to try, I can accept that my life has played out how it's supposed to.  That if my mom were alive (it'd be great), but if she were alive I would be a very different person.  Some ways good of course, but other ways NOT good at all.  In some ways if she were still alive I wouldn't have the courage and strength to take some of the chances I've taken, not because I don't have that strength and courage, but because I would have relied on her for that strength and courage, and that's not bad either, but I can be happy in knowing that though she's gone, I do have strength and courage that wouldn't have had to surface were she alive today.  To me that's a good thing.  I meet people in life who haven't had to find their courage and their strength and sure, sometimes I'm a little jealous that their life seems "easier" but I know it's a good thing that I'm stronger and have been forced to find that.  Does this make any sense?  Maybe I'm just trying to convince myself today, that I'm better despite the loss.  Hard to convince myself, especially today, but ...  Ya know, if I succumb to that negative feeling, and don't fight it... well that wouldn't be good.  So as lame and thinly-veiled my attempt to see the positive, I know it's important to try, even if it is a crappy attempt. ;)